Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L USM (67mm filters, 22.0 oz./623g, about $900). enlarge. I'd get it at Adorama or Amazon.This free website's biggest source of support is when you use those or any of these links when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live — but I receive nothing for my efforts if you buy elsewhere. I'm not NPR; I get no government hand-outs and run no pledge drives to support my research, so please always use any of these links for the best prices and service whenever you get anything. Thanks for helping me help you! Ken.

Excellent optics, superb autofocus, light weight and fantastic Image Stabilization for ultra-sharp results even hand-held at one-eighth of a second — if your subject holds still that long and you're a smooth shooter.

Bad

For $1,000 all I get is an all-plastic exterior and crappy plastic hood? At least the lens mount is metal, exactly like the $125 Nikon 50mm f/1.8 D.

Except for Image Stabilization, the Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro has equally excellent optics, autofocus and ergonomics, with less weight, for half the price.

For anything at least 3 feet away, the Canon 100mm f/2 USM is sharper, offers twice the speed for moving subjects (f/2.0), a metal filter thread, and is also half the price of this 100mm f/2.8 L IS Macro.

For serious macro work, macro-specialists (and I) prefer the 180mm f/3.5 L USM, because it lets us stand far enough away as not to interfere with lighting or the subject's attitude, and most importantly, gives a more natural perspective precisely because we're able to stand further away from our subjects. The 180/3.5 doesn't cost much more than this 100mm f/2.8 IS.

The Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro L IS is a swell lens. It weighs less than you'd first expect, which is a good thing. it is ideal for use as a general-purpose telephoto, especially if you need close-focus ability.

It's great that it doesn't weigh much, but I would also feel a bit ripped-off paying $1,000 for it, too, when the older non-IS Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro does exactly the same thing, without IS, for half the price. Both have exteriors made entirely of plastic, except for the metal lens mount, another reason I would feel shorted paying $1,000 for this lens.

The Canon 100mm f/2.8 L IS is a compromise. It's a lens best carried in the field as a combination macro and medium telephoto. For serious macro work, I won't use a 100mm lens, because by the time I get close enough to make use of the macro ability, I'm so close that I get in the way of my lights, I annoy any sentient subject, and because I'm so close, the subject doesn't look as good because I am so close.

For instance, with the hood attached, this lens can focus as close as than 2 1/4 inches (6cm) in front of the hood. There's no way you can get light in and therefore use this lens that close, if you really want to shoot macro with the hood.

For serious macro work, like making the product photos of this lens for this review, I use a 200mm macro lens, which in Canon, is the 180mm f/3.5 L USM, which doesn't sell for much more than this IS 100mm Macro.

Image stabilization (IS) is not relevant to serious macro work, which is done with strobes to allow us to shoot at f/32 to hope to get something in focus. IS is extremely useful for general-purpose hand-held telephoto shooting, but for general-purpose telephoto shooting, the Canon 100mm f/2 USM is sharper, twice as fast, and half the price of this IS macro lens.

If you're photographing anything alive, especially flowers, they wiggle around either by themselves, or from the breeze, so IS and longer exposures don't help you. That's why strobes are so important for macro: they give enough light to let us shoot at f/32, which is optimum for macro, and also have a short duration to stop whatever's moving.

How do we get sharp photos of butterfly wings? Even at f/32, almost nothing is in focus at macro ranges, so we spend a lot of time making sure that the wings are flat, and do our best to place the wings in our very shallow plane of focus.

These caveats aside, if you're looking for one telephoto to put in your bag that will do everything well, this is it. The 100mm f/2.8 IS L Macro works great as a general-purpose tele to replace the 70-200mm f/4 L IS for less money with less weight, and works well as close, and closer, than any rational person would ever want to shoot.

Personally, I bought the 100mm f/2 USM for myself instead, because for general use, the 100/2 USM is smaller, lighter, feels better made, is twice as fast, sharper and costs only half as much.

As a Canon EF EOS lens, the 100mm f/2.8 L IS Macro works perfectly with every Canon EOS camera ever made, meaning every Canon DSLR and every Canon autofocus film camera made since 1987.

This means of course it sings on today's 5D Mark II and Canon 7D, but it works just as well on my original Canon EOS 620 from 1987. I know; I tried it, and IS and autofocus work just great. AF works 85% as well on my 23-year-old EOS 620 as it does on the 7D and 5D Mark II; they just have more sensors.

Like al SLR lenses, the diaphragm is never perfectly symmetrical at smaller apertures. This is normal; this isn't a LEICA rangefinder lens, which are about the only lenses whose diaphragms are perfectly symmetrical at all apertures.

The EOS system does not indicate the true f/stop as focused more closely. If using an external light meter — which isn't likely — you will need to compensate manually for the natural light loss as focused more closely.

It takes only 135º to go from end-to-end of the focus scale, which means that I found the gearing a little fast for my taste. It makes it easy to get the lens from one end of its range to the other, but it is not as precise as I'd like for fine focus at f/2.8.

Hunting and Hanging

It is common with all AF macro lenses that often your next shot will require a completely different end of the focus range. When it's that far out of focus, the AF system can simply give up and not focus at all.

Presuming you have your camera set to the appropriate Cfn menu option, I could never get AF to hang or to hunt. It simply went where it needed, and bang!, perfect focus.

A menu item that could lead to your camera not focusing is C.Fn. III #1 on the 5D Mark II, where it's called "AF/Drive when AF impossible." (Other cameras may call it something different, or not have that option at all.) Set this option to FOCUS SEARCH ON so that the camera can keep looking if it can't see what to do. Set this to OFF, and if the image is way out of focus with a macro, the camera will simply hang and give up, unless you help it out with the manual focus ring first.

The color balance of the 100mm f/2.8 L IS is a little bit warmer than my Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, which I used as a reference because it is a very simple lens. The 50mm's small number of coated surfaces and very few elements yield fewer opportunities to alter light transmission, so I picked it for this experiment.

In this experiment, I set a manual white balance to the 50mm lens, then shot the same gray surface with the 50mm, and then with the 100mm at the same manual white balance setting.

In other words, in this experiment, I forced the 50mm to look neutral, which shows how the 100mm IS differs from the 50mm. This experiment shows the difference; not which is best.

"Real Stops Improvement" are how many extra stops I got, IS ON compared to IS OFF.

"Marketing Stops Improvement" isn't comparing the speed I can use from IS OFF to IS ON, but instead comparing the speed one can use with IS ON to the old-wives-tale speed of 1/focal length. That's called Lying with Statistics.

If the subject is moving, the 100mm f/2 is better because the extra stop of real speed lets you use a faster shutter speed to stop the action. Image Stabilization does nothing to stop subject motion; it serves merely to counteract camera motion.

Macro lenses lose light as focused more closely. I'll skip you the real reason, but suffice it to say that as magnification goes up, the light has to be spread further.

Canon EOS cameras don't show the true f/stop as these lenses are focused more closely. As one focuses to 1:1, one loses about 1 1/2 stops of light, but EOS cameras keep reporting the same f/stop regardless.

Because of this, you will have to compensate if using an external meter, which is very uncommon today. Most of us use our TTL meters, which work fine.

On the other hand, Nikon's AF cameras and macro lenses report the actual effective f/stops as one focuses more closely, so they always show the correct reading.

Sharpness doesn't matter much, and especially doesn't matter with macro lenses, since sharpness in macro depends more on our ability to manage planes of focus and depth-of-field than any limitation of the lens' optics. Serious macro shooting is done at f/32, where diffraction makes all lenses equal anyway.

Ignoring the superior 100mm f/2, at f/8 and infinity, this f/2.8L IS is the same as the other lenses on the 5D Mark II.

Macro lenses have focused internally since the 1980s, and automatically optimize themselves to any distance as focused (Even the only fixed (non-floating element) design I tried, the introduced-in-1970 Nikon 105mm f/4 Micro, was also about as good as the newer macro lenses, even at infinity.)

The 100mm f/2 USM is sharper, if you're counting pixels at large apertures.

In the real world, your sharpness is more dependant on what you can get in focus. If you're using this for macro, it will take you about two snaps to realize that with macro, there is almost nothing in focus, because depth-of-field is paper thin. At f/32, you might have half a millimeter in focus, and whether or not you can get a sharp picture depends on how well you can wrangle all of your subject into that thin plane of focus.

Back to test conditions, which can see things about lens performance that never come out in actual shooting unless you are very, very good, here's what I see.

As seen on the 5D Mark II (Full-Frame 21MP):

f/2.8: Reasonably sharp in center, a little softer on sides.

f/4-5.6: The sides get progressively sharper as stopped down.

f/8: Optimum.

By comparison, if you're splitting pixels at larger apertures, the 100mm f/2 USM makes this 100mm f/2.8 look like something's broken by comparison, but this Macro lens is about the same as most of Canon's other L lenses.

Here are extreme crops, presented at 100%, from the top right corner of 5D Mark II images:

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